François (Benoit Magimel) has returned to France after living in Chicago for the past three years to find that, despite his father Gérard’s (Bernard Le Coq) intriguing intimations, little has changed in the petit bourgeois household of the Charpin-Vasseurs. His determined stepmother Anne (Nathalie Baye) has channeled her energy towards a mayoral candidacy, against the […]
Category: Directors
La Cérémonie, 1995
A young woman named Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is interviewed for a housekeeping position at the country estate of Catherine Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) and her family. Sophie is enigmatically succinct in her answers, but her references are highly complimentary, and she is immediately offered the job. However, from the onset, it is evident that there is […]
The Story of Women, 1988
During the darker days of German occupation, Marie Latour was guillotined for crimes against the country, one of the last women to be executed in France. In The Story of Women, a dispassionate narrator recounts childhood memories of Marie Latour, his mother, with seeming detachment. Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is a young, neglected wife struggling through […]
Le Boucher, 1969
The discordant opening music of Le Boucher accompanies a series of curious limestone cave formations, and serves as a harbinger for the tragic events which are to unfold in this idyllic French countryside. Helene (Stephane Audran) is a beautiful, sophisticated school headmistress who moved to the region after a failed relationship. Popaul (Jean Yanne) has […]
Climates, 2006
Nuri Bilge Ceylan elegantly channels the spirit and self-reflexivity of Atom Egoyan’s Calendar and Roberto Rossellini’s seminal Voyage in Italy (that in turn, paved the way for Michelangelo Antonioni’s psychological landscape films) to create an equally sublime, serenely composed, and understatedly bittersweet chronicle of the dissolution of a relationship through the austerity and desolation of […]
Distant, 2002
An impassive man, statically framed in nearly imperceptible long shot slowly, and laboredly, traverses an untreaded, snow-covered open field carrying a duffle bag until he emerges in near frontal medium shot on the other side of the clearing towards a deserted rural road. It is an unhurried, deliberative image that recalls the extended final sequence […]